tribal trekker: Island travel, on to another jungle for Christ

11/28/2011

“We need to be at the boat at 7am in order to make it to El Nido in time to catch the shuttle going to Puerto.” sabi ng host missionary.

We just finished a language assessment with a friend of ours on another island. He is working in an area where the Gospel has not reached yet, and is doing well in his progress for learning the local language of the island! That means another unreached tribal area of the Philippines will soon have the Gospel!

So there we were, ready to go at 7 am, and our guide didn't show up! We waited, and waited, and finally decided to walk across the island to the boat by ourselves, pulling all our bags in a hand cart. When we got to the beach, we saw why our guide didn't show up – low tide! Our guide, or boat captain, had been drinking the night before, so he didn't pull the boat out past the tidal area. There was our boat, sitting on the sand! And we had to get to town that day...

Well, in a situation where time is of the essence, and you are on an island waiting for the tide to come in so that you can leave, what do you do? Nothing, of course! All we could do was sit and wait for the tide to come in. Well, we could have tried to swim across the open ocean... No, probably not a good idea.

While waiting for the tide to come in, we looked at squid eggs in the water, and talked about different things. Finally the tide has risen by about 6 inches, and so we called some other people over and we began pushing the boat towards the deeper water. It took about 10 of us, but we made it! We were off the island by 9 am, and our host called the shuttle van and asked them to hold the van for us. I don't know how the other passengers took it, waiting for 2 extra hours, but they didn't say anything to us. Once we were on the road, fantastic...

And of course, at Roxas we stopped at the Vietnamese restaurant for lunch. Wow. The most amazing food ever, and all for only 100 pesos. I always get the “beef stew with noodles”, and I never get tired of it!

Back in Puerto Princesa, we settled down and got ready for the next leg of our trip, which began this morning!

So, yesterday morning I was on a small island in the middle of the ocean, and today I am up in the northern part of the country, getting ready to go by helicopter into another tribe tomorrow!

We are in Tuguegarao, and have looked at our flight base up here. The base actually belongs to another mission, and they have shared the use of it with us. Their ministry is doing really awesome things for god – they record Gospel lessons in 4 or 5 of the major dialects of this area, and then broadcast them on different radio stations at designated times so that people can hear, come to know Christ, and be encouraged.

I was talking to the missionary in charge of this ministry, and he had some very keen insights into the world around us today. He said, “Why do you think that we have all this technology, the ability to travel, and the ability to send radio messages and internet email and all those things?” He believes that God restrained us from acquiring this knowledge until recent times.

Think about it from this perspective – the ancient kingdoms could build pyramids and giant statues, navigate by the stars and do all kinds of amazing things, but they couldn't look at a duck taking off from the water and figure out the simple mathematics of flight? It is not that complicated – wind speed over a wing, increase the lift over the drag, and you get something airborne. Leonardo Da Vinci may have been ahead of his time, but perhaps it was because God was only just beginning to allow man's mind to be opened up to this technology. And why would He do that now? So that we could use this technology to finish getting the Gospel out to all ends of the earth. That is what God is all about – the completion of taking His Gospel message to every people, tongue, tribe, and nation!

So while he broadcasts Gospel messages, we send people out into the hills. And with all these different means of taking the Gospel to the nations, soon every tribe will have been reached! This is what we hope for and pray for, and what we labor for!

Tomorrow we will be going into another tribal area, to a location off on a remote hilltop, where the Gospel has never penetrated. The people there are not really “tribal” like the Palawanos we served with, but they are still unreached with the Gospel and greatly in need of the message being preached there.

Click on any picture below to enlarge.